Federal Union

The hand of history

2009-11-23T17:30:00.000Z

In the Daily Telegraph, we find that Conservative shadow defence secretary Liam Fox is adjusting his tune on Nato members’ military commitments. (Read the article here.)

Formerly, he had expressed the view that Nato should lay down minimum requirements for defence expenditure by each member state. Of course, as this blog pointed out, such a policy must lead to an end to decision-making by unanimity if countries are effectively to be forced by others to spend more on defence. Conservatives have long argued that defence was a matter of exclusive national sovereignty, and it was remarkable to see Dr Fox propose an end to this previously unassailable position.

He has learned now that a Conservative eurosceptic is not the most credible advocate in the eyes of other countries that are being asked to spend more. His new policy reflects that realisation. Instead, he wants to recognise that countries bring different sets of concerns to the international table and cannot be expected to emulate the British model just because he says so.

He says:

“We need to be clear that there are constitutional and political reasons why some Nato countries will not be able to do the same amount when it comes to expeditionary warfare. We can either hammer on about burden sharing, or we can start looking at what countries will be able to do within their political, constitutional and military constraints. Far better in Nato that countries have roles which they are 100pc willing to carry out.”

The suggestion is that British forces will withdraw from their bases in Germany, themselves a post-war hangover, and that other countries, e.g. Poland, might provide soldiers to replace whatever it is that the British troops are doing there right now. This way, he hopes to get a greater commitment to Nato from some other countries without dragging them into the war in Helmand straightaway.

It implies a degree of mutual decision-making on defence matters that Nato often aspires to but does not often reach. If it takes a Conservative eurosceptic to increase the degree of supranational thinking within Nato, that is an ironic but nonetheless welcome step.

Dr Fox has critics. A correspondent in the Daily Telegraph today wrote “This can only mean that the forces of other Nato countries will sit around in Germany while we go and do their fighting. What possible justification for this can there be?”

The justification for this is that other Nato countries have no intention of doing the fighting that the British happen to think is necessary, and that under the rules of national sovereignty, they are not obliged to change their minds. Yet another illustration that national sovereignty does not always work in the national interest.

A president for Europe

2009-11-19T10:28:00.001Z

The BBC appears to have taken some kind of corporate decision to refer to the post of president of the European Council as “president of Europe” or “president of the EU”. (Here, for example.) Sometimes, when they’ve got the space, they use the proper term, but they are willing to use the misleading shorthand.

Of course, one has to accept that the national broadcaster is entitled to use the vernacular rather than stick to the technical terms, in order to be comprehensible to the audience, but that vernacular should not serve to be misleading, which the term “president of Europe” is.

First of all, the powers of the president of the European Council are nowhere near as extensive as those conjured up by the notion of a president of Europe. He chairs, he does not lead. He certainly does not “rule” (pace the Daily Express yesterday) nor does he “control” the European Council, as the BBC political analyst Mark Sanders said on the Richard Bacon show when I was a guest. Do not get carried away with the novelty.

Second, if one must use the term “president of Europe” because it is so convenient and attractive, use it to describe the president of the Commission. It is the Commission president who sets the legislative agenda, controls the budget, and manages the civil service staff, not the Council president. Better not to use the term at all, but if you must, it is President Barroso.

The fact that the European Council president chairs but does not lead gives the lie to the second bit of nonsense on the TV last night, when ITV declared that the procedure being followed was ridiculous: each national government leader expressing views about other potential candidates as and when their names emerge, rather than anything more formal. Think about how the secretary-general of the United Nations is chosen, or the secretary-general of Nato. The EU is simply following that method.

Now, federalists criticise the way that intergovernmental organisations take decisions like this, and we would criticise the manner in which the European Council president is being chosen, too, but the EU is not unusual in behaving in this manner now. Above all, the realisation that this is the method being followed must impact on the expectations that some people have of the post and, by contrast, the relative expectations that they should have of the Commission president instead.

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I broke with my normal writing practice in the third paragraph of this blog entry to refer to the Council president has “he” rather than a gender neutral term. Partly this was because it made the sentences flow better, but mainly it was because that is an expression of the likely reality. It is wrong that politics at EU level is so male-dominated, but let me point you to a website that argues for the opposite: http://www.genderbalancedcommission.eu/

Tuna off the menu and onto the agenda

2009-11-18T15:01:00.001Z

Environmentalists are angry about the decision by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) at the weekend to reduce the allowable catch next year from 22,000 to 13,500 tonnes but not to abolish it altogether. Stocks of tuna are at dangerously low levels and might not come back, even if fishing is halted for a while.

But tuna is a popular foodstuff and thousands of jobs in different countries around the world are dependent on meeting that demand. There would be severe economic consequences from closing down the tuna fishery.

Tuna shoals roam widely and often in international waters. National management of tuna stocks would never work, therefore, and since the late 1960s, there has been an international organisation, ICCAT, to take international decisions instead. This is not a blog about fishing, but it is a blog about international organisations and the experience of ICCAT tells us a lot.

What we find is that ICCAT has not worked. Its aim is “to co-operate in maintaining the populations of these fishes at levels which will permit the maximum sustainable catch for food and other purposes”, but from the present state of the tuna population it is clearly failing to meet its aim.

What redress is there? How can ICCAT be brought back to doing what it should have been doing all along, namely conserving tuna stocks?

There is no parliamentary assembly in which these issues can be raised. The only bodies represented in ICCAT are national governments: there is no role for people with a political mandate other than that of the governments themselves. In effect, ICCAT is in the hands of fisheries protection officials. The first step in ensuring proper representation has not been taken.

The second step in ensuring proper representation has not been taken either. The ICCAT system does not include a court in which decisions of the officials can be challenged on the grounds that they are in breach of the ICCAT rules. The people who judge whether the officials of ICCAT are doing a good job are the officials of ICCAT.

But the interest in conserving tuna stocks goes way beyond the officials in the ICCAT system. If tuna stocks are to be protected, ICCAT itself needs to change.

What we see in ICCAT is purest intergovernmentalism at work. Governments are free to act without the awkward incumbrances of public opinion or the rule of law. This, in the world of the euroscepticism, is international decision-making the way it should be. I, along with anyone who really cares about saving fish stocks for future generations, beg to differ.

Two points about Afghanistan

2009-11-11T11:50:00.001Z

George W Bush won the 2000 presidential election arguing that America should turn away from the nation-building efforts that had characterised Bill Clinton’s foreign policy and focus more narrowly on specifically American interests around the world. His immediate focus was China, which he saw as a “strategic rival”, leading to crises such as the downed American navy surveillance plane that was forced to land in Hainan after a collision with a Chinese fighter jet in April 2001.

His attention was forced back to the Middle East by the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre and on Washington DC, at which point the neo-cons in his administration had a pretext for regime change in Iraq and America found itself back in nation-building on a scale even Bill Clinton would never have contemplated. Before the war in Iraq, of course, there was the war in Afghanistan and the removal from power of the Taliban. That war in Afghanistan is still with us (and with the Afghans), as are the nation-building efforts.

Hamid Karzai has been re-elected as Afghan president, which was a clear goal of western policy. Every country has a president, so Afghanistan must have one too; no matter that his government is rotten and corrupt, winning a fraudulent election that in many parts of the country did not really happen at all. This is nation-building.

It would have been better to have had a policy of democracy-building instead. Politics should start from the bottom with local elections, before rushing to elect a national president. Democracy needs to be based on the foundations of local participation, rather than suspended from international intervention from above. Nick Horne, a former UN official in Afghanistan, puts it like this:

“Afghanistan requires fundamental political reform — a stronger parliament so that power can be shared between Afghanistan’s myriad ethnicities, who can hold the executive to account; and decentralisation to enable Afghans to participate in governance within their communities — something much more in keeping with Afghan traditions.”

(Read his whole article here.)

The obsession with national politics is obscuring the more important concern about politics as such. Politics can, and must, exist at levels other than the national.

My second point about Afghanistan is the same one, but applied to the western armies themselves.

Given the current failure of strategy – 8 years of war and no closer to victory – politicians in Britain, America and elsewhere are thinking about what to do next. One idea is another surge, sending a lot more soldiers to the battlefield to try to win the war. Another idea is to redefine what victory means, abandoning the idea of creating a western-style liberal democracy where one has never existed before and settling instead for stability. If that means that the Taliban gets back into power and oppresses women again as it did before, then that is a price worth paying if it means an end to the flow of casualties back to Wootton Bassett and Dover Air Force Base.

Whatever decision is finally reached, about whether to escalate or withdraw, it is essential that the decision is taken and implemented collectively. A number of the problems that exist at the moment arise from a patchy and uneven implementation of the current policy. Some countries are willing to send soldiers to fight in Afghanistan, while others see their contingents as there to build schools and direct the traffic. One does not look at the western military presence in Afghanistan and see a coherent determination to prevail.

Barack Obama won his election to the presidency promising to re-engage with America’s allies around the world. Here is his test: can he assemble a collective international understanding and commitment to a new Afghan policy, or will he merely be able to lead America and one or two friends? Will he establish an American policy on Afghanistan, or a policy that might actually have the chance of success?

Six pledges by David Cameron

2009-11-05T14:22:00.001Z

The speech by Conservative leader David Cameron yesterday dropped the previous commitment to a referendum on the Lisbon treaty and replaced it with six pledges that he aims to achieve in the course of the next parliament. (Read the speech here.) Arch-opponents of the EU like Daniel Hannan and Roger Helmer have protested about the end of the referendum commitment, but David Cameron has recognised that the only thing a referendum on Lisbon could do would be to drive Britain to the margins of Europe: it wouldn’t actually get the Lisbon treaty changed.

His six pledges are divided into three that Britain can do on its own and three for which it needs the agreement of the other member states. The first three are:

1. A law to ensure that any future pooling of sovereignty within the EU, such as a new treaty or joining the euro, is approved by a referendum. Referendums have increasingly become the norm for constitutional matters in the UK – think of the votes on devolution to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, London and the north east of England, or the promised votes on the euro or the constitutional treaty – so it is hard, on a specifically European basis, to object to this. It is wrong, though, to picture this as a criticism of the EU: no, it is a criticism of the unwritten British constitution. (And theorists of representative democracy might have something to say, along with people concerned about the influence wielded by a biased, unfair media.)

2. A law to ensure that any use of the passerelle clauses in the Lisbon treaty, which replace the voting method of unanimity with QMV in certain policy areas, has to be approved by primary legislation, rather than a simple parliamentary vote. Again, this is a reflection, and a rather damning one, on British parliamentary procedure. So much for the esteem in which Westminster was once held.

3. A law to assert that, in the last resort, the British parliament remains sovereign. We are told that the German constitutional court has already ruled something similar in Germany. The fact that, in Germany, a court has decided this tells us a lot. The court was ruling on the Lisbon treaty and whether it was compatible with the German constitution, and the answer was that it was. The point about where ultimate sovereignty lies arises from an examination of the Lisbon treaty, and the conclusion reached in Germany could be reached here already. (If the German court had reached a different conclusion, it might have had words to say about the Lisbon treaty as a result.) For a law to be passed in the UK to confirm what the German court has already identified would be about as meaningful as passing a law to confirm that London is the capital of the UK. Some people might find comfort in such a law, but it would merely state something that is already an objective fact.

(There is a school of thought that interprets Mr Cameron’s rather vague remarks on this point as meaning that UK law should become superior to EU law. If that is really what is meant, that would be tantamount to passing a law for Britain to leave the European Union, and that would surely be in profound contradiction with point 1 above.)

All of these three proposals are purely domestic laws. They are entirely within the capacity of the British parliament to agree. The next three proposals are changes to European laws, and would need to be agreed by all 27 member states.

4. An opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights. It is already the case in the Lisbon treaty that the Charter cannot be used in the UK domestic courts, but that does not mean that judgments on cases arising in other member states that rely on the Charter cannot be applied as law in the UK too. I suppose that Mr Cameron thinks that this goes too far, but the legal wording that will deliver such an outcome is surely going to be hard to find and even harder to agree.

5. An opt-out from social and employment policy. Britain used to have an opt-out of this kind written into the Maastricht treaty, but one of the first acts of Tony Blair’s Labour government in 1997 was to get rid of it in the Treaty of Amsterdam. To reinstate it would be harder than David Cameron seems to think, given that social and employment provisions are scattered in several parts of the treaty (making the legal drafting hard) and are considered by the other member states to be an integral part of the single market (making political agreement even harder). Why should the other countries agree to something that will either give the UK a competitive advantage or impair the rights of workers in their own countries? Some small concessions in some areas may be possible, but demanding anything general or major looks as though it will lead to a serious fight.

6. An opt-out from criminal justice measures. In the Amsterdam treaty, where all this started, and in the Lisbon treaty that is about to come into force, the UK already has the right to choose whether or not to take part in European cooperation on criminal justice. Perhaps Mr Cameron’s complaint is that the Labour government has in the past often agreed to take part in these measures and he now wants to reverse those decisions. As with social and employment policy, some small changes might be possible but larger ones will be much harder.

In his speech, David Cameron sought to emphasise that, while the three changes to European laws that he sought required the agreement of the other member states, he did not expect them to refuse given that they would not have an adverse impact on those member states. In that respect, he is wrong.

I have already mentioned the impact on the single market that might come from a British opt-out on social and employment policy. The current British opt-out from the Charter contained in the Lisbon treaty already reduces the rights of non-UK citizens in that it limits their ability to bring cases against the British government on human rights grounds (and there are several million such people in the UK) and any government is going to be interested in the rights and well-being of its expat citizens in other countries. And this blog has written repeatedly about the importance of cooperation in the field of criminal justice and extradition, given that a country that provides a safe haven for criminal fugitives is actually a danger to its neighbours.

In each of these three cases, the impact on the other member states might be small, but it is not non-existent. Any attempt to open negotiations on these points needs to be aware of this fact.

Mr Cameron hopes that his new policy will lead to a settled and sustainable relationship between Britain and the rest of Europe. He will need to satisfy both his anti-European critics within his own party and the governments of the 26 other EU member states. He may find this quite hard.

A deal with the Czechs

2009-11-03T10:48:00.000Z

So, a deal was struck with the Czech Republic to get the Lisbon treaty through. An opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights, along Polish and British lines, was added to the treaty, and that was enough to satisfy the Czech president, Vaclav Klaus. (Read page 15 of the European Council conclusions here.)

Opponents of the European Union say they find the manner in which agreement was reached unedifying: they are right, but for the wrong reasons.

The treaty that will finally come into force is not the quite the treaty that the Czech parliament thought it was voting for. Czech citizens will be denied the right to litigate against their own government on the strength of provisions in the Charter, a denial of rights that will be approved retrospectively by the Czech parliament in the next accession treaty (probably for Croatia). This is a rather clumsy and inelegant way to give or deny rights to citizens, but it is a principle of the European Union that it is for each country to decide for itself how to ratify the treaty and if this is what the Czechs want to do, they are entitled to do it.

The argument put forward by federalists that member states have obligations towards each other even in the way in which they ratify the treaty still holds good, and indeed gets extra force from the Czech example. It remains an error on the part of the European convention not to have considered the ratification procedures as an intrinsic part of the whole treaty-drafting process. If ever there is to be another treaty, not only the content but also the manner of ratification needs to be thought about too.

Two other observations arising from the Czech experience. First, the opt-out demanded by President Klaus was entirely unnecessary. His concern was to ensure that the Beneš Decrees could not be overturned by the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and that therefore the Charter had to be disconnected from the Czech courts.

The Beneš Decrees were established in the aftermath of the second world war and the expulsion from what was then Czechoslovakia of the ethnic Germans who had lived there. The rights of the expelled to return and reclaim property were annulled by these decrees, and there is an insistent lobby in Germany and Austria, composed of these expelled Sudeten Germans and their descendants, that they should be overturned.

An analysis of the issue by Professor Steve Peers, of the University of Essex, published by Statewatch argues convincingly that the Charter could not be applied anyway. It has been established by the European Court of Justice that EU law, of which the Charter is part, only applies to member states after they joined the EU. It cannot be backdated. The Beneš Decrees therefore, because they date from the 1940s, predate Czech membership of the EU and are beyond the reach of the Charter. (Read Steve Peers’ briefing here.)

A second point relates to the intervention of the Czech president in this matter at all. The Czech constitution, like most national constitutions within the EU, requires ratification of the treaty by parliament, with, as with all other laws, a final signature by the head of state. The presidential signature was conceived of as a symbolic, procedural act, and not the expression of a political opinion. UK law only comes into force when it has received Royal Assent, for example, but that does not mean that the Queen has a veto over all Acts of parliament.

However, the Czech president, who unlike the British Queen has an electoral mandate of some kind, has chosen to interpret the constitution differently. He has turned his duty to sign legislation into a right, and has imposed his views upon the country against the will of a majority in the parliament.

What this shows is that systems of government, even those founded upon written constitutions, are dynamic systems, not static ones. It is not possible to define precisely how a political system will work in advance. The argument put forward by some federalists that there is a profound difference between a set of treaties and a constitution looks more theoretical than practical, in this light. In reality, there is a continuous spectrum of political documents, and the transition from treaties to constitution will be gradual and not dramatic in its effects. Some federalists may have oversold the consequences of having a constitution; many eurosceptics have certainly exaggerated the dangers.

Expats and MPs

2009-11-02T11:34:00.000Z

President Sarkozy has floated the idea of having French MPs to represent French people abroad. There are hundreds of thousands of French citizens living in the UK – London is now the seventh largest French city – and they currently have little voice in French politics. Candidate Sarkozy came to London to campaign for votes during the presidential election – French expats in the UK are probably more favourably disposed to the centre-right than the average French voter at home – and now he thinks about extending the principle.

In Italy, there already are parliamentary seats for expatriate voters, and in a narrow election they may well have made a difference. In the first years after communism, Hungary considered setting up polling stations among the ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania, but to do so would have caused a major dispute with Romania and so they wisely did not press ahead.

Giles Tremlett in the Guardian today welcomes the proposal. (Read the story here.) As a long time resident of Spain, he pays taxes there but has no vote: as a long-term expat from the UK, he has no vote here either. So where does he have a vote? The answer is nowhere, as far as national elections are concerned. (He has a vote in municipal and European elections, thanks to the Maastricht treaty, but as everyone reading this blog should know by now, the issues of tax and spend are decided nationally and not by the EU.)

The simplest and most straightforward change would be to extend the right to vote in national elections to long-term legal residents. Within the EU, this could be done on the basis of mutual confidence among the member states: ideally, there would be a treaty change but there is not much enthusiasm for another one of those in the near future.

As Giles Tremlett observes, the current system of denying the vote to long-term foreign residents makes a travesty of the principle of no taxation without representation. He has found another example where the principles of democracy and national sovereignty are in conflict: as ever, faced with such a conflict, this blog chooses democracy.

The wrong campaign for president

2009-10-29T15:51:00.000Z

The Financial Times today carries an article by Paavo Lipponen, former prime minister of Finland, outlining his view of what the role of president of the European Council entails. (Read it here.) Another candidate launch, in other words, to join those of Mr Blair and Mr Juncker.

No doubt it is certainly welcome that there is so much public speculation about who should fill the important leadership roles in the European Union, but I can’t avoid the feeling that this campaign is over the wrong job. After all, it is the president of the Commission that is the more powerful role within the institutions: it sets the legislative agenda, controls the budget and leads the executive.

Furthermore, it is the Commission president who is elected by and accountable to the European Parliament. The Council president reports to the EP four times a year after each summit but, other than that, need give it no special attention.

The choice of Commission president is, therefore, to some extent dependent on public opinion – ideally, it would be entirely dependent on public opinion as expressed in the European Parliament elections – but was made, this time, virtually without reference to the public. There was a single candidate who toured the national capitals and secured his election.

On the other hand, the choice of Council president is designed to be one from which the public is excluded – the electorate is confined to members of the European Council themselves – yet this is the election where the candidates are parading in front of us. Curious, no?

Praise where it is due

2009-10-29T11:59:00.001Z

This blog specialises in criticising politicians when they say and do things that fall short of our ideas about democracy, effectiveness and accountability in political institutions. So it is only fair to praise someone when he has done something good.

Step forward foreign secretary David Miliband, whose speech on Monday 26 October entitled “Strong Britain in a strong Europe” makes excellent reading. (You can find it here.)

It is on the Foreign Office website, so the attack on the Conservative contained in his remarks hides behind the phrase [Party political content], but if you read his positive words about the value of European cooperation in foreign policy, you can probably work out what he would have said.

Blair vs Juncker for president of the European Council

2009-10-28T15:40:00.001Z

Historian Simon Schama has a marvellous knack of explaining the big themes of history through the life stories of selected individuals. For example, in his “History of Britain”, he describes the peak and decline of the British empire using the contrasting stories of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, and in the marvellous “The American Future”, he uses the life and career of Montgomery C Meigs, Quartermaster General of the Union armies during the American civil war, to bring together the development of American republican nationalism with its economic ingenuity and its military prowess. Everything you need to know about the victory of freedom in the cold war you can find in the life of Brigadier General Meigs.

In a similar way, the debate about the future of the European Union can be captured in the candidacies of Tony Blair and Jean-Claude Juncker for the post of president of the European Council.

On the one hand, we have a British prime minister who is both famous and controversial. He is undoubtedly a world figure, the kind of person who stops the traffic in the major capital cities of the world. His supporters say he offers a vision and leadership, qualities that the EU lacks right now. If the EU is to get the attention of its own voters and of its partners around the world, it needs to be led by someone who is a born attention-getter.

However, while fame and notoriety may look the same, they actually are rather different. Critics of Mr Blair have plenty to say, too.

He may have been first elected in 1997 on a promise to bring to an end British doubts about the EU, but those doubts are now stronger than ever. The opt-outs built into the Lisbon treaty leave Britain still on the margins of the EU and not in the mainstream. And even Mr Blair’s election-winning prowess is not all it seems: his vote declined from 13.5 million in 1997 to 9.5 million in 2005, a fall of 30 per cent in 8 years. He was saved only by the peculiarities of the First Past The Post electoral system (a system he proposed changing in his 1997 election manifesto, by the way).

So Mr Blair offers leadership and flamboyance, excitement and vision: with him as president of the European Council, the EU would be a more exciting place.

Mr Juncker, on the other hand, offers the opposite approach. He has been a steady, relatively low-key leader of Luxembourg, one of the smallest EU member states. He excites few political passions, but then he does not intend to. What he does do, though, is to reassure partners, fix deals, and reach agreements. He, as president of the European Council, would represent Europe as a place that is quietly getting on and doing things, rather than making a grand fuss but not actually achieving much.

If one thinks about the most significant act of Tony Blair’s time in office, the invasion of Iraq, he tried at first to rally the whole of Europe behind his policy, but when he found that many countries in Europe did not agree, he set about denouncing them rather than seeking unity behind a modified or different policy. Mr Juncker’s supporters suggest that is not the ideal track record for someone who seeks to be a unifier and not a divider. Mr Blair offers more excitement, but perhaps he has excited us enough.

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Here is Eurosceptic blogger Iain Dale on the subject:

“My overwhelming thought is that the EU and Tony Blair deserve each other.”

“It seems to me that flailing around trying to carve out a role for yourself on the world stage is something both Blair and the EU have been trying to do for several years. And neither have met with huge success.”

Achievements over the past 20 years

2009-10-27T16:08:00.001Z

I went to an interesting discussion this morning on the achievements of the European Union over the past 20 years. There were many of them mentioned: enlargement; the euro; some developments in CFSP; and, interestingly, the creation of a European policy on mergers and competition. The speaker was Lord Brittan, who had been competition commissioner when this new policy was established, so it is fair enough for him to declare it one of the main achievements in Europe.

It is worth looking at this policy more closely. It was a Conservative government in Britain at the time, with figures such as Margaret Thatcher and Nicholas Ridley responsible for British policy. How come such dedicated Eurosceptics agreed to such an extension of the power of Brussels?

The answer is that it suited business. Streamlining the regulatory process and creating a common set of rules for the whole single market were important steps to take in improving European competitiveness, and even for Tory Eurosceptics, competitiveness trumped sovereignty. Maybe the next government will draw the same conclusions: we live in hope.

Behind this analysis is the assumption that the enactment of policies is as much an expression of European integration as the creation of institutions. Federalists argue, naturally, that the institutions are necessary – that is how the policies can be guaranteed – but simply creating those institutions is not sufficient. They have to work well, too.

A racist on the BBC

2009-10-23T14:06:00.002+01:00

The rest of the country is blogging and tweeting about Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time last night, so let me join in. For those who have the good fortune not to know, Nick Griffin is the leader of the far right British National Party who was elected to the European Parliament in June, and who had hitherto been excluded from mainstream political broadcasting on the grounds that he himself was not in the mainstream.

Now that he has been elected as an MEP and has started collecting the £76,000 salary that goes with it, things are different. The BBC offered him a slot on its flagship political discussion programme Question Time, where he took a place alongside four other political and public figures in front of an agitated studio audience.

Opinions differ as to how well he performed: the people who oppose him say he did badly; those who support him say he did well. To me, I think the most important thing was that he was laughed at. His attempt to present his racist views just looked ridiculous. And so it should.

The central proposition of the BNP ideology is that human existence is a contest between different races. This is wrong, on two counts. First, there are no races. There is a diversity of racial characteristics – take a look at any Premiership football team over the weekend – but it is not possible to divide humanity into discrete racial groups. There is a spectrum in which each of us has a place, but where no definitive lines between people or groups of people can be drawn.

The second error is that there is no contest between groups. He has misunderstood evolutionary theory. In fact, there is not even competition between individuals: the competition upon which natural selection is based takes place between genes. Nick Griffin’s idea of race has nothing to do with it.

Even they were scientifically founded, his ideas would not have to be accepted morally; but the science doesn’t stack up either. Would you buy a round-the-world air ticket from someone who thought the earth was flat?

The division of humanity into groups based on ethnicity or nationality is a cultural notion, not a biological one. (I wrote about this on the blog in the context of Somalia two weeks ago.) It is not an immutable force before which politics must tremble: it is a fact of the way we live that politics, if it wishes, can change.

The future of the EU after the Lisbon treaty

2009-10-22T19:20:00.000+01:00

I was asked to give a talk to the politics society at Royal Holloway college in Egham a couple of weeks ago, on the future of the EU after the Lisbon treaty. I turned the notes from my talk into article, which you can read here.

Justice and peace

2009-10-09T16:26:00.000+01:00

The Archbishop of Canterbury was forced to give a sermon today at St Paul’s cathedral at a service to mark the end of military operations in Iraq. You can read the sermon here.

After readings from the Old and New Testaments, the archbishop Rowan Williams observed that:

“The conflict in Iraq will, for a long time yet, exercise the historians, the moralists, the international experts. In a world as complicated as ours has become, it would be a very rash person who would feel able to say without hesitation, this was absolutely the right or the wrong thing to do, the right or the wrong place to be.”

Would it be very rash to say such a thing? Would it be rash to say that the war was wrong, that the crisis should have been dealt with in a different way? The archbishop’s logic is to suggest that support and opposition to the war are morally equivalent. I think the archbishop is being the opposite of rash.

The hollowness of the case for the war is revealed by the archbishop’s closing remarks, in which he wants “to speak our thanks for those who have taught us through their sacrifice the sheer worth of justice and peace”. This is why I say he was forced. He praises the soldiers for what they did, but let us ask what it is they did. What have we learned about “the sheer worth of justice and peace”? The answer is nothing.

Let us imagine that a dictatorship arises somewhere in the world that starts to develop weapons of mass destruction with the clear result of making its neighbours feel threatened. It denies any such intention – why, its motives are entirely peaceful – but the rest of the world is unconvinced. If that should happen, what do we do?

What we do is the same as we did last time. Different countries will wave around different collections of evidence and different sets of analyses in the hope of convincing world opinion. World opinion will look at this evidence and these analyses but will also look at the commercial interests of the countries involved and the lucrative new market opportunities they seek. Perhaps they will also try to judge the sincerity of the political leaders who are doing the waving, but by what standards can this sincerity be judged? Who can prove that he or she means what he says?

And then, if one country is powerful enough and desperate enough, it can simply take the matter into its own hands. There is no means of stopping it: the rest of the world can either join in or stand by and hope for the best.

This is how the crisis over Iraq unfolded: it is happening again over Iran. The world has found no means of taking collective decisions over collective problems since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and it has no means of taking decisions on how to deal with Iran now.

If “the sheer worth of justice and peace” meant anything, it would have meant this. But it doesn’t. We have learned nothing. The archbishop should not be so polite.

Proof of origin

2009-10-08T10:20:00.001+01:00

A continuing theme on this blog is the way in which politics has to adapt to the real world. Theoretical concepts such as democracy, sovereignty and free trade need to be looked at through the prism of biology and geography. Political life has to bend to the facts, and not the other way round.

A scheme floated recently by the British government to use genetic evidence to determine nationality is a good example of a political notion that does not fit the facts.

The UK is concerned that there are so many people seeking asylum from Somalia and, worse, there are people from countries other than Somalia that are pretending to be Somali in order to be allowed into Britain, too. The government proposes to use DNA testing to determine whether or not a claimant is really from Somalia or from some other country. (Read about the proposal here.)

The problem is that DNA testing can reveal no such thing. The national borders we know today are the result of political events – wars, plebiscites, marriages – and not of natural or biological ones. Even where geography has taken a hand, such as England and France being separated by the Channel, plenty of people have crossed from one side to the other, taking their DNA with them. To imagine that the people of the world can be biologically divided into national groups is simply bad science.

A conclusion that flows from this fact is that national borders themselves need to be looked at differently. They play an administrative purpose in politics, but not a moral one. This is a powerful argument for federalism: it fits the world in which we live in a way that nationalism does not do.

What happens to the Lisbon treaty now?

2009-10-06T14:18:00.000+01:00

The vote in Ireland last Friday, or more accurately the result last Saturday, has cleared away the biggest obstacle facing the ratification of the Lisbon treaty. The only member states that are still to complete ratification are Poland and the Czech Republic, in each of which the democratic political processes have already been concluded.

There have been some suggestions in Poland that President Kaczynski’s signature could be used as a bargaining chip in trying to extract concessions from the rest of the EU. Everybody wants him to sign: could there be some value in this?

“Let's squeeze as much as possible out of Brussels”, said Zbigniew Girzynski, an MP from the Law and Justice party.

Of course, it would be completely scandalous to try to do so. The Lisbon treaty has been approved through the Polish parliamentary process and it would be a complete abandonment of democracy in Poland to refuse to sign the treaty now.

In the Czech Republic, President Klaus is even more of a eurosceptic that his Polish colleague, and he too is refusing to sign the treaty. His stated reason is that there is a legal challenge still pending in the Czech supreme court. Of course, the legal challenge is only a pretext and not a reason. It brings to mind a football manager’s complaint that the referee was biased or unfit when a decision went against his team, and is considered similarly embarrassing in the Czech Republic itself.

David Cameron’s strategy for the Lisbon treaty depends on Messrs Kaczynski and Klaus continuing to delay signing their names, President Kaczynski forgetting to bring a pen, President Klaus being stuck in traffic, things like that. It is all rather absurd, isn’t it.

Thoughts really need to turn to how a Conservative government will adapt to governing in a post-Lisbon Europe, and how much of a fight it might try to pick with the rest of the EU.

Making assumptions about other countries

2009-10-05T09:38:00.001+01:00

Now that the Irish have proved that they remain the nation of Molly Bloom, the eyes of Europe return to the Conservative party.

Tory front bencher Michael Gove was on the radio this morning, explaining his party’s refusal to confirm what it will do is the Lisbon treaty is already ratified by the time it comes to power. If ratification is still not completed in all 26 other member states, and at the present time it is outstanding in two, then Conservative policy is clear. But if ratification is completed?

Michael Gove would not say. Sticking to the possibility that either or Poland or the Czech Republic will be yet to complete ratification by then, he said that “We’re very careful not to make assumptions about what other countries will do.”

Well, isn’t that the problem? For what if the Tories do get to hold their referendum and are able to kill the treaty as a result? Britain’s long-standing policy of seeking closer cooperation with its European neighbours will not merely be halted but ripped up. The anti-Europeans in Britain might welcome this, but what about our relations with the rest of the EU? What kind of damage might be done to Britain’s interests there?

This is the kind of thing we hope that our politicians would have thought about before embarking on such a potentially destructive policy. They have to make plans for likely eventualities. I don’t find Michael Gove’s blithe confession of his inability to think ahead very comforting.

¤ ¤ ¤

More confusion from the Conservatives about where they stand.

Boris Johnson, mayor of London, has suggested that there ought to be some kind of “consultation” in the absence of a referendum. He said:

“If and when the treaty is ratified and that's before a Conservative government comes in, then it's a difficult matter, and obviously William Hague and David Cameron will have to give effect to the consultation I think people will want to have. I think you will find that there are things that could be done, and it's certainly the case that you could put key parts of this treaty to the people and you could certainly find out what people thought about it."

But that’s not how European treaties are negotiated. They are a package, formed out of a compromise, and each member state has to accept or reject the whole thing. To encourage the idea that Britain can pick and choose which parts of the treaty it might accept or reject, after the treaty has been negotiated and even after it has been ratified, is going to create more problems and misapprehensions, not fewer.

And then there is Chris Grayling, who is reported by the BBC as saying that there is "a very strong sense ... that we simply can not accept what is on the table" with the Lisbon Treaty. But he urged the party not to become obsessed with Europe in the run-up to a general election "when the rest of the country want to be debating health and education and how we are going to balance the books".

But that doesn’t work as a strategy, either. For how can Chris Grayling justify embarking on any kind of attempt to change the Lisbon treaty if he is not willing to discuss it with the voters first. He lays his own party open to the same criticisms as he has been happily been making of Labour.

The Irish vote today

2009-10-02T09:54:00.002+01:00

The Irish people vote on the fate of the Lisbon treaty today: British eyes are looking west to see what they will decide.

One of the founding principles of the European Union is that it is for each country to decide for itself whether it wishes to engage in the EU and, if so, how. The decision to hold a second referendum on Lisbon was taken by the Irish parliament, not by the EU. The people in Britain who say that it is wrong for Ireland to have a second referendum are presuming to second-guess the decision of the Irish parliament. No-one should force the Irish to vote again, but no-one should prevent them, either.

But British eurosceptics often find it hard to come to terms with the new Europe. Here is Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail today:

“How bizarre it is, how grotesque and how ironic too, that the future of this once great imperial power called Britain should depend on the votes of a few million Irish people such as these.”

Well, an EU in which every treaty needs to be agreed by unanimity and ratified in every member state will always mean that the decision in each country is of vital interest and will have a great effect on all the others. It was the great federalist Altiero Spinelli who wrote about how one country’s constitutional arrangements could be a matter of concern for its neighbours. Stephen Glover echoes this thought.

If he doesn’t like that thought, there are two alternatives. The first is to have a system of treaties that does not require unanimity for its amendment, permitting those countries that wish to deepen their integration to do so without having to drag all the others along with them. If the Irish vote No today and kill the Lisbon treaty, this might be how Europe develops in the future.

The second option would be for Britain to opt out of the European Union altogether. That way, the influence that Ireland has over Britain might be reduced. The consequence, and the drawback, of this is that the influence that the world’s biggest powers, such as America and China, would have over Britain would be increased. Membership of the EU is the means by which Britain can speak to America and China on something approaching equal terms – do we want to spend our lives scurrying through hotel kitchens chasing after the American president?

No, the best option for Britain is to be in the European Union, strengthened by the Lisbon treaty. For that, we need the Irish to vote Yes today. Let us hope that they do so.

Extradition to America, yet again

2009-09-28T11:43:00.002+01:00

Another extradition case hits the headlines. Film director Roman Polanski, who is wanted in the United States – he absconded from court before sentencing for a crime to which he had pleaded guilty – has been arrested in Switzerland. The Americans want him returned to California to serve the jail term he has so far avoided.

There are complications. The offence took place 32 years ago, and the victim says that she has now forgiven him. Are these factors that lessen the demand for justice?

Roman Polanski is a French citizen and has lived in France since his escape. French law does not permit the extradition of a French citizen to a foreign jurisdiction, which is why he has lived the last 30 years in safety. (Federalists tend to find uncomfortable such an intervention by national sovereignty into the workings of the criminal law.)

He has been unable to travel to the United States, to collect his Oscar for The Pianist, for example, nor could he go to foreign countries which themselves have extradition treaties with the United States. His film “Tess” had to use northern France to substitute for the characteristic landscapes of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, for example, for fear of arrest and extradition from the UK.

Fans of extraterritoriality followed the libel suit Roman Polanski brought in London against Vanity Fair, a magazine published in New York. (The global reach of English libel laws is something of a sore issue in many countries.) Mr Polanski was permitted to give evidence by video link (the first time this was ever allowed) rather than be required to appear in person in court. He was thus able to claim the protection of English law when it suited him but not when it didn’t.

The foreign ministers of France and Poland are now trying to intervene to save Roman Polanski from being extradited to America. I’m not sure what the conclusion of the case should be, but the distortions caused by national sovereignty are thrown into sharp relief.

War is hell (2)

2009-09-25T16:46:00.000+01:00

I have written on this blog before about the impact that fighting has on people – how violent acts create a violent culture that spreads within society. This is aside of course from what it actually does to the victims.

Now there are news reports about what war does do the perpetrators. A survey suggests that 10 per cent of Britain’s prison population is made up of ex-servicemen. Whether this is to do with the actual traumatic experience of combat or the methods of training and induction the armed forces use is not clear. (It could of course be because the people who want to serve in the armed forces are also the people who are most predisposed to commit crimes.)

There is more and more evidence that war is not a simple, clean course of action that can easily be embarked upon by politicians in pursuit of a favourable headline. Its consequences are far-reaching and long-lasting and every effort should be made to find an alternative way to resolve international conflicts.

Symbol of a closed order

2009-09-22T12:13:00.000+01:00

A news story in EUobserver last week on the plans for a new building for the Council of Ministers reminded me of the issues we raised the last time the Council moved to a new building. (Read the EUobserver story here.) That was in 1995, when the number of member states had just jumped from 12 to 15 and the programme to create the single market had created a great deal more legislative work to be done. However, in those days, the attachment of the Council to secretive working practices was much more far-reaching than it is now. The Financial Times published the following letter from me (on 31 May 1995):

“Sir, On Monday, the Council of Ministers opened a new headquarters building. Built at vast expense on a prime site in the centre of Brussels, you might expect that provision has been made so that we can see what is being done in our name and with our money. But you would be wrong.

“The council still normally meets in secret, allowing the public to watch only the occasional formality.

“The European Union may have started as an intergovernmental club, meeting in secret and voting by unanimity, but that was in the days when it dealt with intergovernmental matters.

“Times have moved on. The European institutions these days make law. Their decisions affect every one of us. It is inevitable that those institutions will be unpopular when they insist on following the rituals of diplomacy rather than democratic practices.

“The new council building is a symptom of this. We will be told that the building symbolises the new forms of decision-making within the union: no, it still symbolises the old style. The building may now be open, but the council itself is not.”

A similar complaint pertains regarding the new building today, but not to the same degree. (Read about it here.) And the Lisbon treaty would, if ratified, take a further step towards fixing it. But it still remains the case that the Council is not as open as the European Parliament, even when doing the same job, i.e. debating, amending and adopting legislation. (You can read an analysis of the differences here.)

No conspiracy: just the facts

2009-09-21T11:53:00.002+01:00

The political gossip columns are delighting in the suggestion in Adam Boulton’s new book that Peter Mandelson’s return to government last summer was all part of a conspiracy. (Read the Mole in the First Post, for example.)

The story is that Lord Mandelson came back in order to help Gordon Brown stay in office long enough to see the Lisbon treaty safely ratified. Once the treaty is in force, the post of president of the European Council is created, and Tony Blair steps forward into the role. Lord Mandelson’s motivation for this is, according to Adam Boulton, because he is “a lifelong member of the European movement".

I’m afraid that Adam Boulton was scooped on this story by this blog back in June, but you don’t need to drag Tony Blair into it. What is at stake is not the interest of an individual but of the entire country.

For if the Conservatives get into power before the Lisbon treaty is ratified, they have said they will re-open the British ratification and put it to a referendum, campaigning for a No vote. A British rejection of the treaty will kill it, which is what they say they want.

But a British rejection of the treaty in a referendum would kill much more than the treaty alone. What of Britain’s relationship with the EU as a whole?

Think of all the rhetoric that might unfold during the referendum campaign. What would all the people say who want Britain to leave the EU altogether? They are an increasing vocal force in British politics, let’s not forget. All kinds of things might unfold from a referendum and it would be hard to stitch together any kind of productive partnership if the anti-Europeans are given a chance to wreck it. Preventing the risk of this disastrous outcome is a valuable enterprise – Peter Mandelson should be praised for this, not condemned.

If there is a conspiracy, Adam Boulton is looking in the wrong place. For why are the Tories calling for a referendum at all? Why don’t they simply declare that they will use their Commons majority to reverse the country’s policy on Lisbon?

It is not as if they believe in referendums on principle, for where is their support for a referendum on electoral reform or on Scottish independence or on the future of the monarchy? They are not advocating a referendum on Europe out of an enthusiasm for direct democracy.

No, the thought grows that they actually like the idea of upsetting Britain’s relationship with Europe, of throwing everything into doubt, but don’t actually want to say so. A referendum campaign would have the strategic function of levering Britain and Europe apart, but dressed up as a debate about Lisbon. If there is actually a European conspiracy afoot, it’s this.

Subsidiarity man

2009-09-20T12:15:00.006+01:00

I was delighted to find in an old collection of papers this cartoon: it appeared in The Independent some time in 1991, I think, when the term "subsidiarity" first made its way into the debate about the European treaties. The awkward British problem with the idea is summed up, isn't it.

Re-election of Barroso reveals old flaws

2009-09-18T12:21:00.000+01:00

A vote by the European Parliament earlier this week confirmed José Manuel Barroso in office for another term as president of the European Commission. Mr Barroso had been more or less openly campaigning for this result for the past year, so he can look back with considerable satisfaction on what he has achieved. I think the rest of us can probably be a bit less pleased.

First of all, the election itself has been widely mocked. There was but a single candidate, after all. However, that is not Mr Barroso’s fault. Where was the Socialist alternative? The Socialist group in the EP voted against Mr Barroso’s nomination, but they did not put forward anyone else instead.

Next, which rules was Mr Barroso elected under? The Nice treaty reigns at present, so he is the Nice president. When the Lisbon treaty comes into effect, as we hope it will, the rules change. The powers of the Commission president become subtly different, and his method of election changes too. Fortunately, Mr Barroso would have been elected even under the new rules (which demand an absolute majority of MEPs rather than just a simple majority), but the uncertainty does not help.

A third point to note is the way in which the MEPs themselves voted. The Socialist group formally opposed him, but the Socialist MEPs from Portugal and Spain voted in his favour. It would be foolish to deny that there are differences of perspective among the MEPs from different member states, and that these differences will translate into different policy preferences at European level, but it is a pity that national origin trumped party loyalty in this vote. Mr Barroso had previously secured the support of the Socialist prime ministers of Portugal and Spain, so the MEPs could perhaps claim that national party loyalty was more important than loyalty to their European party.

A fourth flaw is that the vote took place in Strasbourg. The modern home of the European Parliament is in Brussels, and most of the MEPs would prefer to meet there all the time. Brussels is better connected both for transport and for media. The election of Mr Barroso would have got greater attention if it had taken place there. The EP meets in Strasbourg only because it would take a unanimous decision of the member states to change it.

And lastly, there is the reaction of the federalists to Mr Barroso’s victory. Some of them are pleased with his victory, because it will enable the EU to take the next steps forward. Others are critical, because the EU needs to take more than the next steps. Europe needs an inspirational and transformative leader, they say, and Mr Barroso is not it. Myself, I am in the former camp: I think opponents of Mr Barroso are looking in the wrong place.

Even his supporters do not declare that he is the man to lead the next stage in Europe’s democratic revolution. There are some substantial steps that need to be taken to strengthen the EU for the 21st century, both as a power and as a democratic power, but Mr Barroso is not the leading advocate of these steps. However, if he were such an advocate, he would not have been elected president of the European Commission. There is not at present the appetite among the national governments for such steps to be taken, and they would not have gathered their support behind a candidate who thought they were wrong.

It is a human characteristic to let the best become the enemy of the good. In this respect, the federalist movement is all too human. So, rather than criticising Mr Barroso, we should support him and work with him in addressing the immediate challenges faced by the EU. (Andrew Duff describes them well here.)

For inspirational and transformative leadership, though, the federalists should seek to provide that themselves.

European election results finally published

2009-09-14T16:10:00.000+01:00

I wrote on this blog at the end of June asking who had won the European elections. The figures on seats won were quickly announced, but it has taken longer for an analysis of the votes cast to be produced.

In one sense, the European elections are misnamed. They elect MEPs to sit together in the same parliament, but each country conducts its own elections according to its own rules and procedures and on its own timing. Even the polling stations were open on four different days in different parts of the EU. One of the consequences of this is that there is no official EU-wide publication of the results, in terms of the votes cast.

The European Movement has now published its own breakdown of these figures (you can read it here). The analysis reveals a swing from left to right of 1.9 per cent but also a swing from large parties to small ones. The total percentage of the vote that went to parties did not get into the EP at all more than doubled to over 10 per cent. This, coupled with a decline in turnout to 43 per cent overall, shows that the EU still has to convince the voters of its relevance as a place for democratic participation.

The left/right battle that characterises party politics in most EU member states is augmented, and even overshadowed, by a contest between the mainstream of politics and the periphery. It may well be that winning this second contest should be afforded higher priority than fighting the first in the European Parliament in the next five years.